Research Interests

rethinking the literature and culture of modernity from the vantage point of its waterways.

Bio

Margaret Cohen is director of the Center for the Study of the Novel, professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization, and research affiliate of The Europe Center. Her research interests involve rethinking the literature and culture of modernity from the vantage point of its waterways. She is currently working on a book concerning how the history and representation of global ocean travel informed the development of the modern novel.

Her publications include Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution and The Sentimental Education of the Novel, that was awarded the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione prize in French and Francophone Literature. In addition, Margaret Cohen coedited two collections of scholarship on the European novel, The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, with Carolyn Dever, and Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, Genre, with Christopher Prendergast.